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Blogs by syshook
Posted Jul 09, 2009 | General | 324 Views   (Updated Jul 10, 2009 11:42 AM)

Bring Home The Magic of Music

Spell Casio in front of a keyboard player, and no matter how amateur, the look you will receive is that of extreme disdain. With good reason too. For a very long time, Casio was associated with products that were hamstrung by lack of functiona... Spell Casio in front of a keyboard player, and no matter how amateur, the look you will receive is that of extreme disdain. With good reason too. For a very long time, Casio was associated with products that were hamstrung by lack of functionality, cheesy design and downright irritable functions (typewriter sound on every keypress of the control panel). That appears to be changing if the new series of Casio products is checked out. Some of the glory achieved in 80's(lost in 90's) seems to be returning with products that feature excellent feature-set and pricing that can't be beat. For a long time, I was desirous of buying a keyboard for home use, but wanted something better than the toy keyboards. To my dismay, the cheapest amateur keyboard made by Yamaha was priced at over Rs. 12K, while I had set a budget of Rs. 11K. Any other brand was way more costly. Even the USB Controllers (without sound-generators) were priced at almost 10K. By chance I walked into this small shop (Musical Mart, Tel: (40)27891024) after checking out the bigger music stores in town and the vendor was not only willing to dig out the products from his godown, but allowed me to play with what he had at the store too! When I told him my budget and asked for his suggestion, the first few keyboards CTK-2xx series that he implored me to check out were rejected by me for not being at-least General MIDI compatible (in otherwards, a blasted toy). So I pointed the CTK-810 and asked him for the new CTK series. The new CTK Series (2000, 3000, 4000, 5000) feature 61 full-size keys, 300+ tones, 150+ styles, GM compatibility & USB out). Where they differ is in the quality of the sound and additional features such as Pitch Wheel & Save on SD-Cards. The highest model CTK-5000 (approx. 14K) features all, CTK-4000 does not have Pitch Wheel & SD Card support, CTK-3000 has Pitch Wheel but no arpeggio & lower sound-depth, CTK-2000 is quite basic and very affordable for everyone (approx 6K). I chose to go in for the CTK-4000 since I need USB connectivity (use the keyboard as a MIDI controller with Software synthesizers such as Reason), Instruments with rich sound (for direct sound recording from Keyboard) & features such as Split, Layer, Arpeggio, Touch etc. Two features that I chose to forgo are - saving tracks on SD Card (I use a PC for all sequencing & recording) & Pitch Wheel (4K diff. was too much for a wheel, I will apply wheel in software). Please don't think that I am a Pro/Amateur musician. All that I and friends get around to playing and recording are a few hit english soulful numbers - tremendously relaxing experience for us. What impressed me right away about the keyboard was it's sound quality. Sounds are rich, layered and sound different depending on velocity. Striking the keys rapidly produces twangy sound in plucked/hammered instruments, drums ring. Striking softly reduces even a Bright Piano to quivering mass of jelly. The USB connectivity worked flawlessly out of the box. Connecting to Windows XP computer didn't require any driver. Options to set MIDI-Out parameters allowed the MIDI data to be exported from different channels. Unlike many keyboards, I was able to even export the MIDI data of the standard styles on the keyboard (this feature is locked in most keyboards). Some problems did occur with such multi-instrument export, but by and large it worked well. Sounds can be layered on top of another; even sounds that are already layered internally. For ex: Layering Ep-Pad with Piano-Str gives you Electric Piano, Pad, Grand Piano & Strings simultaneously. Add Harmonize function and you could be playing a full-chord in 4 instruments by pressing a single key! Split the keyboard and the left side of the keyboard allows you to assign yet another instrument - making it a total of 5. The split point can be set anywhere among the 61 keys and quite thoughtfully, the split sections can be octave shifted. Finally, you can play a string chord in 4th octave while actually hammering keys of the 2nd octave. Another nice feature is the Auto-Preset for styles. For ex: if you choose a particular Ballad style, just keep the style key pressed for 2 seconds. The ideal style tempo will be set, the tones will be set to match the style (layering and all). No more embarrased pressing of the Tempo buttons as you switch the style from Trance to Blues. Pressing the style button does the rest. The keyboard also features Music Presets. Popular western numbers have been coded in with style & instrument settings. For ex: selecting Careless Whispers automatically selects the 16-Beat style, sets the tempo to slow and changes the Keyboard tone to Sax. Read More
Tags: music keyboard synthesizer
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